George Ainslie - A Research-based Theory of Addictive Motivation

8/12/2019 George Ainslie - A Research-based Theory of Addictive Motivation

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GEORGE AINSLIE

A RESEARCH-BASED THEORY OF ADDICTIVEMOTIVATION

(Accepted September 3, 1999)

INTRODUCTION

This paper examines whether a relatively new line of scientific

inquiry may clarify some age-old puzzles about addiction. Althoughthe most productive research on addictions in recent years has beenthe study of their brain mechanisms, I wont say much about it,because it doesnt do much to change our concepts of these puzzles.It only lets us see in detail the reward process that used to happeninside a sealed box. Rather Ill talk about a phenomenon which hasless obvious implications, but which might wholly recast the way weconceive addiction, the will, and indeed the self. I mean an obscurebut remarkably robust finding of quantitative behaviorism calledHerrnsteins matching law. Few nonspecialists have heard of it, andfew who have heard of it have considered its ramifications. Sev-

eral of these seem inevitable, although I have to admit up front thatdeduction runs quite a ways ahead of experimental confirmation.

The issue of addiction has always been a quandary for the law.The nature of the injury to others is cloudy, and any affront to mor-ality itself is usually defined inad hocfashion, making it difficult tofind amalum per se: Pot is moral in India but not in the U.S.; alcoholis moral in moderate doses, except for Muslims and Baptists, butimmoral in high doses; tobacco started out immoral, became moralto the point of normality, and is now on its way to becoming immoralagain.

Presented at the National Humanities Center Workshop on Addiction and theLaw September 2527, 1998. I thank John Monterosso for his comments.

The U.S. Governments right to retain a non-exclusive, royalty free licence in

and to any copyright is acknowledged.

Law and Philosophy 19: 77115, 2000.

2000Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.


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78 GEORGE AINSLIE

The basic incentive for proscribing addictive behaviors seemsto be that addicts are extremely provocative to the people aroundthem. Its not just that addicts steal and sometimes get violent. Most

addictive substances cost little to make; most of their cost, whichleads to stealing, is a consequence of our attempts to eradicate them.Furthermore, most addictive substances dont cause violent beha-vior. Alcohol, the legal one, is the agent that causes the most by itsown properties. Sometimes the excitement of speed or cocaine leadsto violence; but again, the greatest cause of violence is the illegalitythat makes them the province of organized crime.

Likewise, our irritation with addicts probably does not muchdepend on the idea that theyre a burden on public resources. Sup-porting a non-criminal addict would cost no more than welfaregenerally. Addicts do have a higher rate of medical illness than age-

matched peers. But some of that, including all of HIV, is a byproductof illegality; and illnesses that cause addicts to die young actuallyreduce the burden on social security.

Rather, addicts provocativeness is empathic. Addicts are self-absorbed, a trait thats mildly humorous in small doses, as whenyou see someone staring intently into a mirror. In larger doses self-absorption seems to be disturbing, even frightening, the sensationthat attaches stigma to schizophrenia and led to the persecution ofmasturbation in previous centuries. People take it as a major affrontin its own right.

At the same time, addicts experiences are a temptation to otherpeople, at least early in their careers. Many people are drawn toexperiment with drugs. Addiction seems like a bodysnatching forcethat threatens to lure our children into the ranks of the self-absorbed.Later in their careers, addicts social regression and self-neglectare painful to watch, an outcome that seems to have limited Swissand other European experiments with legalization. Again, its ourempathy that cries out for relief.

The trouble is that empathic injuries have a dubious status in law.We punish haphazardly and without any consistent philosophicalbasis. Its inconsistent to punish a person who kills dogs for sport,

while regarding butchers as upstanding citizens, but we do this indeference to prevailing empathic habits. Likewise, the law punishes


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A RESEARCH-BASED THEORY OF ADDICTIVE MOTIVATION 79

some addictions and not others, not on the basis of their harm butaccording to accidents of social history.

Punishment deters some people from using addictive substances,

and this has been enough to sustain the strategy. Even campaignsthat became distasteful to the public reduced the amount of addic-tion; Prohibition was a success in terms of numbers.1 However,punishment doesnt deter thoroughly. Also, punishment makes thosewho are not deterred more wretched than they were before. Thuscriminalization raises the stakes, but may not improve the averagewelfare of the population at risk.

The comparative failure of criminalization casts doubt onaddicts rationality. Criminals have often been called compulsive,but addicts seem even more so. The robustness of addiction hasbrought forth another response to our empathic discomfort, which

is to see addiction as a disease like pneumonia, in which the victimis passive and needs treatment. However, the victims of other dis-eases want treatment. Addicts often refuse treatment, or, even moreperplexingly, accept it and then work to defeat it.

So the law is caught between conflicting interpretations of addic-tion as voluntary vs. involuntary. Voluntary injuries, even to sucha vague thing as our fellow-feeling, can be sanctionable; diseasesshouldnt be. At a level even more basic than the law, addicts famil-ies experience the same ambivalence between blame and sympathy.Punishment and blame imply someone who is rational at least tothe point of calculating the outcomes of her choices. Treatment andsympathy are appropriate for people who cant do this.

Thus the fundamental question the law asks about addiction iswhether and when, and to what extent its victims choices arevoluntary. Part and parcel of this question is how to understandaddicts own ambivalence: ingesting their substance while sayingthey dont want to. Theyre clearly seeking the increasingly well-explained rewards of ingesting, but why do they sometimes buyways to make themselves stop at the same time? Especially, is thereany way to shore up the side of their ambivalence that supportssobriety?

1 Fisher and Brougham, 1930; Merz, 1930/1968.


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80 GEORGE AINSLIE

Addiction has many other specific properties that are notexplained by conventional theories of either utility or disease. Toname four:

Recovering addicts are often extremely legalistic. AA membersare notorious for seeing the world in black and white terms;many chapters forbid their members all psychiatric drugs, forinstance, on the theory that they may be a slippery slopeback to drinking. People who see themselves as food addictssometimes adopt the highly legalistic cognitive style of anor-exia nervosa. These traits dont represent a simple return torationality.

Willpower often backfires when tried on addictions, leading togreater failure and demoralization. A major movement in treat-

ing addictions aims toreduce

the rigidity of addicts wills. Thisis the thrust of the relapse prevention that was developed atthe University of Washington twenty years ago.2 Similarly, itsthe gist of AAs tenet, one day at a time.

Addicts often fail to notice basic facts about their addictions,such as how much they ingest or that ingestion under somecircumstances counts as part of their addiction. In the extreme,they may develop whole dissociated personalities like Jekylland Hyde.

Even addicts who have been sober for years often say theymiss their addictions. Indeed, society itself has mixed feelings

about addiction, and hence about coercing addicts. Intoxicationis often shown positively in fiction, and people express strongsentiments against variants of Prohibition.

These puzzles suggest the complexity of the addiction problem,which no widely accepted concept has given us the tools to explore.However, basic research in motivation during the last forty years hasproduced findings that will let us return to all of them with at least astarting hypothesis about why they might occur.

2 Marlatt and Gordon, 1980.


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ADDICTION EN TAILS TEMPORARY PREFERENCE

Lets examine first the possibility that addicts are simply following

the best available strategy to maximize utility as they have exper-ienced it. Utilitarian writers in fields from economics to abnormalpsychology depict people as simply trying to maximize their sat-isfactions. To these writers, thats what reasons role is. Its juststraight thinking; the enemy isnt passion per se, or the misuse oflogic, but the simple miscalculation of your main chance. A theoryof rational addiction adopts the discipline that your options haveto compete for your favor on the basis of some elementary motiva-tional quality call it reward a common dimension along whichall options that can be substituted for each other have to compete.Reward is supposed to operate on your choices the way that natural

selection operates on the animals in a species: It keeps the successfulones and drops the others.

Utility theory is widely accepted in the behavioral sciences, butit has always had trouble saying why people regularly defeat theirown best interests, often knowingly and in anticipation of regret.Why do people often fail to choose their best deal among familiaralternatives, even though rats in a maze succeed?

The substance addictions may be the most striking example ofthis puzzle. Observers often blame the biological properties of thesubstance, even though experienced addicts knowingly re-addict

themselves after theyre sober. Addictions that dont depend onsubstances, like gambling and credit card abuse, have the samecharacteristics as drug addictions when carried to the same extent:the promise of a rush of feeling that pre-occupies the addict, therelentless narrowing of alternative opportunities through alienationof family, friends and employers, and even the adaptation of brainchemicals involved in pleasure, so that deprivation of the activityleads to symptoms of withdrawal nausea, sweating, and othercholinergic side effects.3 These non-substance addictions form aconceptual link to a large class of ordinary bad habits, habits thatpeople say they want to be rid of even while indulging in them:

episodic rage, chronic procrastination, a bent for destructive rela-tionships all the patterns that the classical Greeks would have

3 Wray and Dickerson, 1981.


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called akratic, incontinent.4 Unlike substance abuse, these behavi-ors cant be blamed on the distortion of natural motivation by amolecule.

Ironically, the straightforward simplicity of utility theory keepsit from providing an explanation for irrational behavior. If choice isjust a matter of estimating maximal reward, the role of motivationin bad choices will be trivial, since any failure of maximization cancome only from an error in the estimating process. Utility theoristshave been at great pains to find a way around this conclusion.

Is there a commonsense explanation for addiction?A common solu-tion is to suggest that addiction occurs only in two special cases when you dont know its consequences, or when you dont careabout them. In the first case, youre seen as committing yourself to

the poorer but more conspicuous alternative before you know its cost the hangover or damage to relationships is supposed to be a sur-prise. Certainly this could be a factor in how people first get addictedto something. Despite the fact that most smokers, for instance, knowthe dangers of smoking before they start, it may be that they cantpicture how strong their craving will become once theyre addicted.Its also believable that alcoholics and drug addicts cant imaginehow their other options will narrow after theyve indulged in theirhabit for a while. Thus there probably is a primrose path that leadsmany people to addiction.5

However, the popular impression that addictions trap people bythe threat of withdrawal, so that once you start you cant stop,has proven not to be true. In reality addicts stop many times, evenwithdrawing deliberately to cheapen their habits. Furthermore, theprimrose path theory doesnt explain why sober addicts have such atendency to be re-addicted, or why active addicts try to stop by com-mitting themselves in advance for instance by taking Antabuse,a drug that makes alcohol sickening. Once an addict has becomefamiliar with her options, conventional utility theory requires thatany craving strong enough to lead to a relapse has to be strongenough to command consistent preference for the addiction. People

4 Mele, 1987.5 Smokers know dangers: Kessler, 1995; primrose path theory: Herrnstein and

Prelec, 1992b.


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may be deceived into taking up an addictive habit, but not intorestarting a familiar addiction once theyve escaped.

For similar reasons we can rule out the theory that addicts just

dont care much about the future that their addiction comes, in eco-nomic terms, from a steep discount curve for delayed events. Theirdiscount curves may well be steeper than usual, but the rationaladdict as pictured, for instance, by economist Gary Becker, 6

wouldnt ever try to kick her habit, and certainly wouldnt try torestrict her own future range of choice by taking Antabuse. Therational addict who thinks that the high is worth the consequenceswhen the opportunity is at hand should think so at a distance as well.Far from committing herself, she should always keep her optionsopen in case new information makes another choice seem better.

Straightforward value estimators have no reason to bind them-

selves. If your struggle with temptation can be bypassed simply byinsight into your mental bookkeeping methods, volition as a distinctprocess becomes superfluous. Your calculation of your main chanceflows smoothly into action, and your need for a will disappears.Facing this somewhat counterintuitive conclusion, utility theoristshave looked outside of the evaluation process for a way to explainwhy self-control seems to take effort. In effect, they looked for dis-ease processes to explain how people could develop preferences thatwere intrinsically temporary. Two areas of research have sometimeslooked promising:

Does classical conditioning cause the urges of addiction? Perhapssome factor causes unpredictable changes in utility.7 When a stim-ulus picked at random is regularly followed by the emotionallymeaningful events that can trigger reflexes food that producessalivation, pain that produces a racing heart, etc. the random stim-ulus starts to produce behavior very similar to the reflex, withoutthe experimenter rewarding or punishing this behavior. This isclassical conditioning, the kind Pavlov discovered.

At first glance this model promises a way out of the knowing-self-harm enigma. If appetites can be conditioned, the argument

goes, then maybe conditioned stimuli can impose motives on a per-

6 E.g. Becker et al., 1992.7 This possibility is proposed in Loewenstein, 1996 and 1999.


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ness seems to play a role in producing appetite; but we still have toexplain why we change our valuation of the appetite > consump-tion sequence as it gets closer. In any case, people with major weight

problems dont mostly overeat because they keep getting surprisedby appetizing stimuli.

Does addiction come from brain chemistry? Many scientists hopethat our expanding knowledge of the reward process itself willprovide an answer. Since the 1950s neurophysiologists have beenusing brain electrodes to find how and where reward happens in thebrain. They have found that most or all recreational substances, fromalcohol and marijuana to cocaine and heroin, exert their reward-ing effect by stimulating dopamine release in one small part of themidbrain, the nucleus accumbens, which is the same site where nor-

mal rewards like food and sex occur. Different strains of animalshave widely different susceptibilities to drugs, and these can bemodified by stimulating, ablating, or chemically treating neuronsin the nucleus accumbens. These susceptibilities also change overtime as an addicted animal consumes more of the drug, and thechanges correlate with alterations in cell chemistry. Human addic-tions also have genetic predispositions. It seems likely that someaddicts have been at least partly disposed to their habits by theirneurological endowments.10 But these findings still dont explaintemporary preference.

THE CAUSE OF TEMPORARY PREFERENCES

These findings suggest that addiction may well be a disease, in thesense that the addict may have learned to generate cravings in sur-roundings associated with her substance, and/or may have been bornwith a brain that gets unusually great reward from the substance orlittle reward from alternative activities; she may even have deadenedher brain to other kinds of reward through the addiction itself. How-ever, it must be a disease of motivation: Pneumonia doesnt come

from or generate a desire for congestion in the lungs, but addictions

10 Animal brain mechanisms: Gardner, 1997; Hereditary basis of human

addiction: Parsian and Cloninger, 1995; Nestler, 1992.


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come from strong motives and their indulgence strengthens thesemotives in turn.

The crucial point is that strong motives in themselves shouldnt

lead to temporary preferences, at least according to conventionalutility theory. They dont explain why an addict should fail whiletrying to stop, or should want to commit herself to stop in the future.They dont say why an alcoholic should buy Antabuse.

There is an innate tendency to form temporary preferences. Anothersolution to the self-harm puzzle has always been logically possible,but it has been seriously considered only recently: People mayindeed maximize their prospective reward, but discount their pro-spects in a curve shaped differently from the function that bankersuse.

Few utility theorists question the assumption that people discountfuture utility the way banks do: by subtracting a constant proportionof the utility there would be at any given delay for every additionalunit of delay. If a new car delivered today would be worth $10,000 tome and my discount rate is 10% a year, then the prospect of guar-anteed delivery today of the same car would have been worth $9,000to me a year ago, $8,100 two years ago, and so on (disregardinginflation, which merely subtracts another fixed percentage per unitof time).

Utility theory operates the same way for internal reward,although it has to use a fanciful unit of measure like the utile.If drinking a bottle of whisky was worth 100 utiles to me right nowand my discount rate for drinking was 20% per day, the prospect oftodays drinking would have been worth 80 utiles to me yesterday,64 utiles the day before, and so on. Furthermore, if the drinking hasa cost of 120 utiles that has to be paid the day after in the form of ahangover, reproaches from my family, etc., the net utility of drinkingtoday will be 100 (120 80%), or 4 utiles. So I should decide todrink. If I foresaw this episode from a day away, the net value wouldhave been (100 80%) (120 80% 80%), or 80 76.2, or 3.2utiles. At that point I would still have decided to drink.

This arithmetic seems to describe the way many people behavetoward large sums of money bankers, at least, and everyone whois regarded as deciding rationally; but it misses the mark fordrinkers, or least for people whose drinking is serious enough to


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Figure 1. Exponential discount curves from two rewards due at different times.

The taller, later line might represent the value of a pair of water skis in a future

spring, and the shorter, earlier line the value of a sum of money at a point in the

preceding fall. If the money at that point is worth less than the skis are at that

point, it will always be worth less, even many years in advance.

involve hangovers and reproaches from their families. People whoare strongly drawn to drinking or taking drugs, or gambling, orkleptomania, or any other thrills of the kind that people regret typically experience swings of preference between indulging theirhabit and giving it up. And the swings are often influenced by howclose an opportunity for indulgence is. People trying to control a badhabit tend to keep a distance between themselves and opportunity avoid the streets with their favorite bars on them and strategies likethat.11

The car-buying and drinking illustrations assumed that the

internal market in choices discounted future goods according tothe same formula that financial markets do, at a constant rate perunit of delay. Pictured over time, this discounting is described byan exponential curve (Figure 1).12 If the internal market of choicedidnt do this, theorists have argued, it would impair the organisms

11 For most people, the availability of a good excuse is even more important;

but well have to establish why anybody would need an excuse to herselfbefore

we can talk about that.12 It is called exponential because it calculates value by an exponential, or

power, function of the discount rate:

Value = Objective value X(1Discount rate)Delay

An outcome that loses 10% of its value for every unit of time it is delayed is worth

(1.000.10),1 or 0.90 of its value, at one unit of delay (1.000.10),2 or 0.81 of its

value, at two units of delay, 0.39 at ten units, 0.00003 at 100 units, and so on.


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Figure 2. Hyperbolic discount curves from the same rewards as in Figure 1.

At a distance they are valued in proportion to their heights, as with exponential

discounting. However, at some point (in the fall, for instance) these curves may

make the objectively smaller reward (the money) temporarily worth more than the

objectively greater one (the skis). A person with these hyperbolic curves would

sell the skis for that much money at that point, and a person with exponentialcurves would buy them. In the spring, however, both would value the skis at the

same, undiscounted rate; the hyperbolic discounter would have to pay at least

that to buy them back.

adaptiveness. If someone devalued future goods proportionately totheir delay, for instance, their discount curve would be hyperbolic roughly similar to the bankers curve, but more deeply bowed,so that goods at both very short and very long delays would bevalued more than they would with exponential curves, and goodsin between valued less (Figure 2).13

In buying and selling between someone who discounted expo-nentially and someone who discounted hyperbolically, the latterwould be at a disadvantage: Mr. Exponential could buy Mr. Hyper-bolics water skis cheaply every fall, for instance, because thedistance to the next summer would depress Mr. Hs valuation ofit more than Mr. Es. Mr. E could then sell the skis back to Mr. H

13 The simplest hyperbola is:

Value = Objective value/Delay

However, this formula could probably never describe a natural process, since

it would make value infinite at zero delay. A hyperbolic formula that makesobjective value equal to discounted value at zero delay is:

Value = Objective value/(1+Delay)


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every spring when the approach of summer sent Mr. Hs valuationof it into a high spike. Because of this mathematical pattern, only anexponential discount curve will protect a person against exploitation

by somebody else who uses an exponential curve. Thus exponentialcurves seem not only rational, in the sense that they are consistent,but also adaptive. At first glance, it looks as if natural selectionshould have weeded out any organism that didnt discount the futureexponentially.

Nevertheless, theres a great deal of evidence that peoples naturaldiscount curve is nonexponential. The experiment to test whether asubjects discount curves cross is simple: You offer subjects a smallreward at delay D versus a larger reward of the same kind that willbe available at that delay plus a constant lag, L. A subject gets thesmall reward at delay D from the moment she chooses, or the larger

reward at delay D + L. If she chooses the larger reward when Dis long, but switches to the smaller reward as D gets shorter, sheis showing the temporary preference effect that implies a discountcurve more bowed than an exponential one.

When experimenters have used rewards that the subject exper-iences (consumes) on delivery, people have shown a persistenttendency to reverse their preferences as D changes, evidence thattheir basic discount curves cross: Subjects exposed to noxious noiseand given a choice between shorter, earlier periods of relief andlonger, more delayed periods choose the shorter periods when D issmall and the longer periods when D is long. College students showthe same pattern when choosing between periods of access to videogames. Retarded adolescents show it in choosing between amountsof food.14 Certainly at the gut level peoples discount curves cross.

More remarkably, whatever cognitive methods people may havelearned in order to compensate for hyperbolic discounting dontspoil temporary preference experiments. Even money turns out tosometimes be chosen differently depending on D. Various groups ofsubjects have shown the change of preference over a range of Ds.Some excellent recent work by Leonard Green and his co-workers,and by Kris Kirby and the late Richard Herrnstein, have made it

possible to describe the exact shape of subjects discount curve

14 Noise: Solnick et al., 1980; Navarick, 1982; Video games: Millar and

Navarick, 1984; Food: Ragotzy, Blakely and Poling, 1988.


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in similar amount-versus-delay experiments. Its clearly hyperbolicfor all age groups, although older subjects discount the future lesssteeply than younger ones.15

Hyperbolic discounting is even more evident in lower animals,which shows that it isnt some quirk of human culture. In scores ofexperiments theyve always chosen rewards in inverse proportion totheir delays and punishments in direct proportion. Animals alsodo what crossing discount curves predict: In amount-versus-delayexperiments they choose the smaller, earlier reward when D is short,and the larger, later reward when D is long. It was the consistencyof animal findings that led psychologist Richard Herrnstein fortyyears ago to propose a universal law of choice, which he calledthe matching law: that the proportion of rewards chosen matchestheir relative immediacies (as well as their amounts and frequen-

cies of occurrence). tend to be chosen in direct proportion to theirsize and frequency of occurrence, and inverse proportion to theirdelay.16 Many researchers have since offered variations to fine-tunethe matching law to describe individual differences in impatience,but the best seems to be one of the simplest:17

Value = Amount/(Constant1 + (Constant2 Delay))

In practice the constants seem to stay close to 1.0, which simplifiesthe equation still further. When I discuss the likely consequences of

hyperbolic discounting, Ill be using this formula.

Compensating for hyperbolic curves isnt effortless. Most peoplewould probably argue that since only exponential curves produceconsistent preferences, theyre the ones that are objectively true, andthat people should learn to correct their spontaneous valuations to fitthem. After all, the intensity of many other subjective experiences

15 Ainslie and Haendel, 1983; Green, Fry and Myerson, 1994; Kirby and

Herrnstein, 1995.16 Herrnstein, 1961, 1997. The word matchingcomes from his original exper-

imental design, in which pigeons pecked to get food on two independent keys that

paid off at different rates. He found that relative rates of pecking matched theamounts, frequencies, and immediacies of reward.

17 Generalized from Mazur, 1987. I compare the possible formulas in Ainslie,

1992, pp. 6376.


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has long been known to follow hyperbolic curves,18 and peoplecan learn to correct those impressions. It soon becomes secondnature to a child that the telephone pole down the street is as tall

as the one nearby, even though it forms a smaller image on herretina. Even where spontaneous impressions are misleading, peoplelearn to trust instruments for measuring objective size warmthby a thermometer, distance to travel by an odometer or map, etc. without feeling that theyre wrestling with some inner resistance.They develop object constancy. Cant people learn to value rewardin proportion to its objective amount, just as we learn to gaugeobjective temperature and distance? Especially, cant addicts learnnot to be misled by the lure of an imminently available high?

Thats what conventional utility theory calls for; but despite theavailablity of objective ways of measuring time and value, such

adjustment seems to occur irregularly, sometimes not at all. It usu-ally takes some kind of effort (sometimes called willpower) toevaluate a lesser present good as less desirable than a greater onein the future. This is where the analogy of delay to other sensoryimpressions like length breaks down: A person may move throughtime toward a goal just as she moves through space toward a tele-phone pole. The matching law formula describing her spontaneousvaluation of a goal is close to the formula for the retinal height ofthe pole.19 But the pole doesnt seem to get larger as it gets closer,whereas the goal often seems to get more valuable. Insofar as the

person fails to make the correction in value that corresponds to hercorrection of retinal height, poorer goals that are close can loomlarger than better, distant goals. She fails to develop a faculty forutility constancy.

Hyperbolic curves make it easy to explain addiction. It emergesas the state of nature or original sin, everyones innate challenge.Heredity or other factors may make the challenge bigger for somethan for others, but people tend to recognize it as qualitatively thesame as they themselves face, and resent granting addicts exemption

18 Psychologist J. Gibbon has pointed out that the matching law seems to be

only one example of the principle by which many different physical qualities aresensed, known since the nineteenth century as the Weber/Fechner law (1977).

19 Y = l/X, where Y is the magnitude in question and X is the distance to the

pole, or goal.


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from the common responsibility. Before discussing this issue, weneed to look at what lets people sometimes notgive in to their shortrange preferences.

The interests that rewards shape bargain among themselves to

create a self. Is it possible for a marketplace of hyperbolicallydiscounted choices ever to look like a single individual? The prob-lem is that a mind which discounts reward hyperbolically cant bethe straightforward value estimator that an exponential discounter issupposed to be. Rather it will be a succession of estimators whoseconclusions differ; as time elapses these estimators shift their rela-tionship with one another between cooperation on a common goaland competition for mutually exclusive goals. Ulysses planning forthe Sirens must treat Ulysses hearing them as a separate person, to

be influenced if possible and forestalled if not.Consider one of the most widespread examples: A person may

hate to go to bed at a prudent hour, even though she hates evenworse getting up in the morning without enough sleep. Her mindthis morning curses her mind of last night and tries to forestall herexpected mind of tonight, but runs up against the effect of hyperbolicdiscount curves: Her mind holds a population of reward-seekingprocesses that have grown to survive in contradiction to each other,and that endure despite each other. She keeps on staying up latewhen the chance is at hand and the morning is far away unless shecan do someting to bring the incentives to get sleep, which are largerin the aggregate, to bear on the moment she chooses whether to goto bed.

Any explanation of her options has to account for our observa-tions not only of unity but of varying degrees of disunity, rangingfrom preference reversals in normal people to selves that actuallylook like Jekyll and Hyde. The prime suspect is the deeply concaveshape of the discount curves in Figure 2, which limits what the mar-ket of choice can do to unify a persons purposes over time. Ulysseswish to sail home and his wish to hear the Sirens will be integratedonly for individual moments; this integration will make different

options dominant when it occurs at different times, producing aregular conflict between the mental operations that win out whenthe lure of the Sirens song is dominant and those that win out whenthe prospect of finishing the journey is dominant.


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You could call the mental operations selected for by a particularkind of reward the personsinterestin that reward Interests withinthe person are very like interests within a social group, those factions

that are rewarded by (have an interest in) the goal that names them(e.g. the petroleum interest, the arts interest). Since a personspurposes can be coherent except where conflicting rewards domi-nate at successive times, it makes sense to name distinct interestsonly in that case. An alcoholic wouldnt be said to have separatebourbon and scotch interests, even though theyre often alterna-tives, because at the time when she prefers bourbon she doesntincrease her prospective reward by forestalling a possible switch toscotch. But she may have a drinking interest and a sobriety interest,such that each increases prospective reward in its own time zoneby reducing the likelihood of the others dominance. Put another

way, she doesnt increase her prospective reward in either the longor short range by defending her choice of bourbon against thepossibility that she may change to scotch; but she increases herprospective long range reward by defending her sobriety againstdrinking, and she increases her prospective short range reward byfinding evasions of her resolve for the sake of drinking. Whicheverfaction promises the greatest discounted reward at a given momentgets to decide her move at that moment; the sequence of moves overtime determines which faction ultimately gets its way.

Where the alternative rewards are available at different times,each will build its own interest, and one interest will be able toforestall the other only if it can leave some enduring commitmentthat will prevent the other reward from intruding: If the personssobriety interest can arrange for her not to get too close to the oppor-tunity to drink, the discounted prospect of drinking may never riseabove the discounted prospect of the rewards for sobriety, and thesobriety will effectively have won. However, whenever the valueof drinking spikes above that of sobriety, the drinking interest mayundo the effect of many weeks of sobriety. The ultimate determinantof a persons choice is not her simple preference, any more than thedeterminant of a legislatures action is simple voting strength; in

both processes, strategy is all.This process power bargaining constrained by limited access

to your means of expression may be all that unifies a per-


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son. Philosophers and psychologists are used to speaking about anorgan of unification called the self that can variously be confi-dent, divided, conscious, fragile, well-bounded, etc.; but this organ

doesnt have to exist as such. The only factor needed to imposeunity on the various behavioral tendencies that grow from a personsrewards may be the fact that they are, in effect, locked up in a roomtogether.

Four kinds of device can commit future choices. This brings us to theimportance of this model of the self as a marketplace: If a person is apopulation of this kind of roommates, each clamoring to control theuse of the room, how does the matter get decided? One interest canteliminate a competitor simply by providing more reward than theother does, either at one time or on the average, since the competitor

might undo that interests choice when it became dominant at a latertime. On the other hand, to continue to exist each interest has to bethe highest bidder at some time; to achieve this each may have toconstrain others, and not be too constrained by them. Just becausean interest is dominant at one moment doesnt mean it will get itsintended reward; while an interest is dominant it has to forestallconflicting interests long enough to realize the reward on which itsbased.

For long range interests this usually means committing the personnot to give in to short range interests that might become dominantin the future. Long range interests dont usually conflict with eachother, except in the trivial sense of being close choices, because theeffect of distant rewards tends to be proportional to their objectivesize; the less well-rewarded of two equally long range interests tendsnot to survive, but there is no time that this interest includes anincentive to resist this fate, that is, no time when such resistancewould increase the persons prospective discounted reward.

For short range interests, survival usually means evading theseprecommitments. However, short range interests are also servedby committing the person not to act in other, incompatible shortrange interests; and sometimes they can even commit the person

to disobey long range interests. While on an eating binge a personavoids information about calories that might remind her of a diet,for instance, and is incidentally forestalled from having a sexualadventure.


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There seem to be four kinds of tactics you can employ toprecommit future choice:20

1. You can make it physically impossible to choose a future alter-

native, or arrange for additional outside incentives that willinfluence a future self.

2. You can try to avoid information that would change your mind.If you already know that a seductive reward is available, you cantry to avoid thinking about it: If you speak of the Devil, hellappear. This is the advice that was most respected in our culturebefore Freud pointed out the bad side-effects of repression.

3. You can cultivate or inhibit the motivational processes that haveintrinsic momentum for instance, nip an emotion in the budor deliberately provoke a contrary one. These processes canchange how the expectation of reward influences your choice,at least in the near future. Once your appetite for a particularsatisfaction is aroused it has a committing effect that lasts for awhile.

4. You can make a personal rule to stick to your current plan. Thisis by far the most powerful and adaptable weapon against addic-tions, but also the most mysterious. What is there about makinga rule that adds anything to your power to resist changingmotivation?

A SPECIFIC MECHANISM FOR WILL

Conventional utility theory doesnt suggest any role for personalrules but of course, this theory doesnt recognize a temporarypreference problem to begin with. People commonly speak of a kindof self-control that doesnt involve any of the first three devices,but their reports arent revealing. When they give up smoking orclimb out of debt they mostly say they just did it. Words like will,character, intention, and resolve are often applied, but dont suggesthow they help somebody resist overvaluing an imminent reward.

However, several authors dating back to classical Greece have

proposed that the active ingredient in will is the property of unit-ing actions under a common rule. Aristotle spoke of universal

20 Described more fully in Ainslie, 1992, pp. 130155, and in press.


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96 GEORGE AINSLIE

opinions as leading to continence more than particular ones, forinstance. The Victorian psychologist Sully said that the function ofthe will is to unite . . . particular actions . . . under a common rule,

so that they are viewed as members of a class of actions subservingone comprehensive end.21 This has recently been proposed anew bytwo research psychologists. Gene Heyman has reported that pigeonsfacing one of the usual schedules that elicit hyperbolic valuationswill move in the exponential direction if given a special signal thatpredicts additional reward every time they do so. As Heyman inter-prets it, they have come to make their choices in an overall contextinstead of a local one, although the additional reward blurs theimplications of this finding. Similarly, Howard Rachlin has said thatself-control comes from choosing patterns of behavior over timerather than individual acts. He also designed a pigeon experiment,

in which subjects made an impulsive choice significantly less oftenwhen thirty previous nonimpulsive choices were required than whenit stood by itself.22 The effect of choosing in categories doesnt seemto depend on the intricacies of human cognition.

It does require that the impact of repeated rewards accumulatesomehow so that the rewarded behavior can be weighed againstalternatives. This accumulation hasnt been studied much, but someexperiments suggest that the discounted effects of each reward ina series simply add, at least in pigeons.23 If this is at least roughlycorrect, then we have more reason to believe that the shape of thebasic discount curve is hyperbolic, or at least deeply bowed. Bund-ling choices together wouldnt affect the direction of preference ifdiscount curves were exponential.

Consider a series of larger, later rewards and their smaller, earlieralternatives, as in Figures 3 and 4. Exponential discount curves stayproportional, even when a whole series is added together. But withhyperbolic discounting, the reward for choosing among categoriesof reward will be the expected value of series of larger rewardslike those depicted in Figure 4; the reward for a choice that seemsunique will be just the curves from the single pair (as in Figure 2).Thus if discounting is hyperbolic, choosing behaviors in whole cate-

21 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1147a2428; Sully, 1884, p. 631.22 Heyman, 1996; Rachlin, 1995.23 Mazur (1986) confirmed an earlier report of McDiarmid and Rilling (1965).


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Figure 3. The effect of summing the exponential discount curves from six pairsof rewards like the pair in Figure 1. The summed curves are higher than single

curves, but they stay proportional to each other, just like the curves from a single

pair or rewards.

Figure 4. The effect of summing the hyperbolic discount curves from six pairs

of rewards like the pair in Figure 2. The summed curves are not only higher than

the single curves, they no longer cross in the period before the first small-early

reward is due.

gories will lead to less impulsiveness. This explains how people

with fundamentally hyperbolic discount curves can sometimes learnto choose as if their curves were exponential; summing hyperboliccurves bends their shape in the direction of exponential curves(Figure 5).


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98 GEORGE AINSLIE

(A)

(B)

Figure 5. Comparison of (A) exponential and hyperbolic curves from a single

reward, vs. (B) summed hyperbolic curves from series of rewards and an

exponential curve from the earliest of these rewards. The summed hyperbolic

curve moves significantly closer to an exponential shape than did the hyperbolic

curve from the single reward.

The will is vulnerable to special cases. The trouble with will is thatthe insight about choosing according to principle doesnt eliminatethe attraction of small, immediate rewards; it offers only a disci-pline that a long range interest would benefit from at the expense ofshort range interests,if only the person were consistently motivatedto follow it. People who have learned a higher or richer prin-ciple of choice arent thereby freed from temptation. We arent veryold before we discover a perverse truth: If behaving according tocategorical principles promises more discounted, expected reward

than making isolated choices does, then making an isolated choicenow and expecting to act by rule in the future promises still more.The tough question is not how molar bookkeeping recruits motiva-tional support for long range interests, but how this process defends


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itself from short range interests, sometimes unsuccessfully. Actingin my long range interest, how do I keep a short range interest fromrepeatedly proposing an exception to my rule, just this once?: by

realizing that exceptions set precedents, and if I go too far Ill losemy expectation of getting anything like the series of larger, laterrewards.

In this way hyperbolic discount curves make self-control a matterof self-prediction. This effect will be especially noticeable whereself-control is tenuous. The hyperbolic discounter cant simplyestimate whether she is better off dieting or eating spontaneously,and then follow the best course. Even if she figures dieting is betterfrom a perspective of distance, she wont know whether or not shellregularly prefer to eatad libwhen shes hungry. If she expects to eatad lib, her long range perspective will be useless to her unless she

can use one of the first three kinds of precommitments I describedabove not a rich selection or make a personal rule. Her expect-ation that her rule will succeed may be enough to motivate stickingto it, but only insofar as she thinks it will be enough. If she thenviolates the diet and loses faith in it, this condition will magicallystop being enough. Personal rules are a recursivemechanism; theycontinually take their own pulse, and if they feel it falter, that veryfact will cause further faltering.

Even pigeons can learn to peck a key early in a trial to prevent atemptation from appearing subsequently. Soon after I first reportedthis finding, the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe wrote that itwas the simplest example of constitution-making, the way a wholenation binds itself not to be impulsive.24 Certainly hyperbolic dis-count curves should create such a motive in species from the lowestto the highest. But a constitution depends either partly or wholly (aswith Britains) on honoring precedent. Precedent was irrelevant tomy pigeons, as it is to the alcoholic relying on Antabuse. It is thevery core of the will, which could be looked upon as an individualsversion of an unwritten constitution.

Will is cooperation in an intertemporal prisoners dilemma. The will

to stick to a diet has the same properties as the will of the nationsin World War II not to use poison gas, or of those since not to use

24 Ainslie, 1974; Tribe (second edition), 1988, pp. 1112.


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100 GEORGE AINSLIE

nuclear weapons. This will is a bargaining situation, not an organ.In fact it can be well described in terms of bargaining theory:

The relationship of bargaining agents who have some incom-

patible goals but also some goals in common is sometimes calledlimited warfare. Countries want to win trade advantages from eachother while avoiding a trade war; a person today wants herself tostay sober tomorrow night, and tomorrow night will want herselfto get drunk, but from neither standpoint wants to be an alcoholic.Whether the parties are countries or individuals or interests withinan individual, limited warfare describes the relationship of diverselymotivated agents who are somehow in the same boat.

Among agents engaged in limited warfare with each other, theresa practical mechanism for peace: Their mixture of conflicting andshared motives creates the incentive structure of a well-studied bar-

gaining game, the prisoners dilemma: Two or more parties dobetter if they all cooperate than if they all dont; but if only onedefects against the others, she will do better still. Countries at warwill do better by all not using poison gas than by all using it; but ifone country surprises the others, it will do better still.

Why did no country ever use gas throughout World War II? How,in fact, does this situation offer a road to peace? The key fact isthat most parties dont meet to fight only once, and the combatantswere conscious of future battles. Since following suit is both themost obvious strategy and the most successful one in repeated pris-oners dilemmas, each side could reasonably expect the other todo so, knowing only that the payoffs are in a prisoners dilemmapattern. As long as using gas would set a precedent that predictsyour disposition in future battles, and your opponent hasnt shownhow shes disposed to choose, you have an incentive to avoid usinggas.25

But how does this model apply to intertemporal bargaining,where the limited warfare is among successively dominant interests?Their situation seems different. Successive motivational states aretransient, so that by the time the person has entered a contrary frameof mind, she cant retaliate against the earlier self that betrayed her.

In one sense, a person cant meaningfully be said to bargain withherself at a later (or earlier) time. You have no way to reward or

25 Schelling (1960, pp. 5380) gives a clear description of limited warfare.


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punish a bygone past self or threaten a future one who will existwhen your present self is bygone in turn. However, successivelydominant interests do have stakes in each others behavior that are

very close to the ones in a literal prisoners dilemma: The threatthat weighs on your current selfs choice in a repeated prisonersdilemma is not literally retroactive retaliation by a future self, butthe risk of losing your own current stake in the outcomes that futureselves obtain.

Any means of grouping choices in a prisoners dilemma patternhas the potential to succeed as principle of self-control. Any setof parties to a limited war countries, individuals, or successivemotivational states within an individual will seize upon such agrouping if it has this property: that all can see it as dividing areasof mutually advantageous cooperation from areas where the hope of

cooperation is unrealistic. The resulting tacit agreements about areasof cooperation constitute rules in the intertemporal case, personalrules.

In effect this committing tactic creates a side bet: The playersstake their whole expectation of getting the benefits of cooperationon each choice where cooperation is required; this expectation isthe kitty of the side bet, and it may be much larger than what wasoriginally at stake in a given choice.

As a solution to temporary preferences, intertemporal bargain-ing gets both its strength and its weakness from the openness tointerpretation of what constitutes cooperation: what choices setprecedents for what others, and what choices are exceptions. Theperson facing a choice about sticking to a diet, or getting drunk, orindulging her temper, or procrastinating, is always tempted to say,This choice is unique; it can stand on its own. I dont have to worryabout how Ill look back on it when I face this other kind of choicelater on; its just not part of what I bet myself Id do.

This opportunity lets people have some flexibility in their com-mitments If we encounter a kind of choice where the rules we setup seem to make us worse off, we can redraw those rules on thespot so they dont apply to this kind of choice. But in the middle

of a choice between a small, early and larger, later reward, the urgeto see your way clear to take the early one is great, which leadspeople to gamble on claiming exceptions to their personal rules on


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102 GEORGE AINSLIE

shaky grounds. The same problem exists in interpersonal bargain-ing: Cooperation between the countries in the choice about poisongas is threatened by the possibility of choices that are marginal in

their aptness to be seen as precedents, such as the use of gas againsta third nation or the use of an explosive that happens to give offtoxic fumes. A country might hope to engage in such marginal beha-viors without being seen as having betrayed its tacit agreement tocooperate. Because of this hope, there is substantially more risk thatthe country will engage in them and find it has hoped falsely thanthat it will commit an unambiguous betrayal.

Recursive bargaining creates the experience of will. We like to thinkof ourselves as having an organ like the ego, which resembles asailor, navigating by balancing stronger forces than her own:

If Im tacking against the wind, the force of the wind is muchstronger than my arms. I can choose only how to set my sails againstit. But in this analogy the strength I steer with is still my own, andunrelated to the force of the wind. To model strict utility theorya sailor would have to also steer by the force of the wind, whichwould mean that the rationale of the steering mechanism wouldsomehow have to come from the properties of the wind, not theextraneous wishes of a person blown by it. The ultimate dilemma ofthe utilitarian is how to describe such a steering mechanism withoutmaking it seem improbable that the person whose will it representedwould feel human that she would experience authentic doubt,self-esteem, and other subtle feelings, particularly the one necessaryfor legal responsibility: freedom of will. Such a description has, ineffect, to evoke the feeling of being a sailor from the logic of thewind.

Going on conventional assumptions, any maximizer seems likea mere calculating machine, a throughput, as philosopher MartinHollis once characterized it.26 However, in an intertemporal bar-gaining model, will is a recursive process. The person herself cantbe sure of what shell do in the future, and makes her current choicebased on her best prediction. But this choice also affects her pre-

diction, so that before she has acted on her choice she may predict

26 Hollis, 1983, p. 250.


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again, and may then change her previous prediction and thus herchoice.

Although clearly pulled by identifiable motives, a persons choice

in a recursive process cant be predicted with certainty. Neverthe-less, choice is as strictly determined as the weather. This modelpredicts that a persons choice will feel free to her, not in the senseof being random but as something she participates in but can neitherpredict with certainty nor explain from only her incentives them-selves. Even in a familiar choice where she knows what shelldo, her experience has also taught her that a small change evena taunt from a friend about her predictability can reverse the bal-ance. The inscrutable human spirit that transcends mere obedienceto our ostensible motives what keeps the person from being Hollisthroughput comes from the partial responsiveness of the inter-

temporal crowd that she senses around her present self, which ismade up of her own choices but of which she forms only a smallpart at any given moment.

THE NEGATIVE SIDE-EFFECTS OF WILL

All self-control devices can impair your reward-getting effective-ness: If you have yourself tied to a mast you cant row; if you blockattention or memory you may miss vital information; and if you nipemotion in the bud youll become emotionally cold. Unfortunately,the most powerful and flexible strategy against the effects of hyper-bolic discounting, personal rules, also has the greatest potential fordoing harm.

A persons perception of the prisoners dilemma relationship and the valued willpower that results from this perception doesntsimply cure the problem of temporary preference. Intertemporalbargaining doesnt make your spontaneous preferences consistentover time. Rather it formalizes internal conflict, making some self-control problems better, but some worse. Cobbled together from

properties of hyperbolic discounting that apparently didnt muchaffect evolution before humans appeared, it remains something ofa stopgap. Willpower may be the best way we know to stabilizechoice, but it turns out to have serious side-effects.


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104 GEORGE AINSLIE

We dont usually recognize these side-effects as part of usingwillpower. Will seems to be a source of pure strength, with norelationship to such abnormal symptoms as loss of emotional imme-

diacy, abandonment of control in particular areas of behavior,blindness toward ones own motives, or decreased responsivenessto subtle rewards. But I argue that these four phenomena are partand parcel of a reliance on personal rules. They may go so far as toerase the net attractiveness of willpower, even for a persons longestrange interest.

1.Willpower overshadows spontaneous experience. The perceptionof a choice as a precedent often makes it much more important forits effect on future expectations than for the rewards that literallydepend on it. When this is true, your choices will become detached

from your immediate options and take on an aloof, legalistic quality.Its often hard to guess whether youll look back on a current

choice and see it as a lapse. Did eating that sandwich violate my dietor not? Under the influence of an imminent reward you may claiman exception to a rule, but later think you fooled yourself, that is,see yourself as having had a lapse. Conversely, you may be cautiousbeyond what your long-range interest requires, for fear that youlllater see your choice as a lapse. This rationale will make you com-pulsive. Every lapse reduces your ability to follow a personal rule,and every observance reduces your ability notto. Errors in eitherdirection impose costs that would never result from conventionalexponential curves, since those curves wouldnt lead to recursivedecision-making in the first place. For a person resisting the lure ofaddiction, these costs take the form of excessive legalism, one of thetraits of recovering addicts that we set out to explain.

2.Willpower is disproportionately vulnerable to lapses.As the Vic-torian psychologist Sully observed, every gain on the wrong sideundoes the effect of many conquests on the right.27 This is probablytrue because impulses need only a brief moment of dominance tocapture behavior, while the will needs consistent control. The motiv-

ation needed for a sooner reward to spike above the summed curvesof later rewards will be greatest for the first time this happens; each

27 1884, p. 669.


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time it happens your expectation of getting the whole set of delayedrewards becomes less, and thus requires less alternative motivationto pierce it the next time. Awareness of this snowball effect in turn

will make a lapse seem like more of a disaster, which will make theloss of prospective larger-later reward even greater.

The obvious way to repair a lapse is to abandon the particularcircumstance in which it occurred. This means attributing the lapseto a particular aspect of your present situation, even though it willmake self-control much more difficult in future cases where thataspect is present. For instance, you may decide that youcantresistthe urge to panic when speaking in public, or to lose your temperat incompetent clerks, or to smoke after meals. If you no longerhope that your rule will hold in these cases, these urges will seem tocommand obedience automatically, without an intervening moment

of choice.Your discrimination of this special kind of area has a perverse

effect, since within it you see only failure predicting further failure.Ive called this area, where a person doesnt dare attempt effortsof will, a lapse district, by analogy to the vice districts in whichVictorian cities tolerated the vice they couldnt suppress. Where theencapsulated impulses are clinically significant, a lapse district getscalled a symptom.

Thus the perception of repeated prisoners dilemmas stabilizesnot only long range plans but lapses as well.28 Here we havean explanation for how willpower can backfire, another hithertopuzzling aspect of addiction.

3. Willpower motivates misperception. Personal rules dependheavily on perception and recall noticing and remembering yourchoices, the circumstances in which you made them, and their simi-larity to the circumstances of other choices. And since personal rulesorganize great amounts of motivation, they naturally can create agreat incentive to suborn the perception and recall processes. Whena lapse is occurring or has occurred, it will often be in both yourlong and short range interests not to recognize that fact: Your short

range interest is to keep the lapse from being detected so as to letit continue. Your long range interest is also at least partially to keep

28 Discussed further in Ainslie, 1992, pp. 193197.


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106 GEORGE AINSLIE

the lapse from being detected, because acknowledging that a lapsehas occurred would lower the expectation of self-control that youneed to stake against future impulses.

After a lapse, the long range interest is in the awkward positionof a country which has threatened to go to war in a particular cir-cumstance that has then occurred. The country wants to avoid warwithout destroying the credibility of its threat, and may thereforelook for ways to be seen as not having detected the circumstance.Your long range interest will suffer if you catch yourself ignoringa lapse, but perhaps not if you can arrange to ignore it withoutcatching yourself. This arrangement, too, must go undetected, whichmeans that a successful process of ignoring must be among the manymental expedients that arise by trial and error the ones you keepsimply because they make you feel better without your realizing

why.29 As a result, money disappears despite a strict budget, andpeople who eat like a bird mysteriously gain weight.

Clouding of consciousness in the face of temptation has beenfamiliar to observers from Aristotle to the present day.30 Heres amotivational pattern that could easily create a black market, indeedan underworld, of those interests that can control attention so asto block your notice and recollection. In addicts this distortion ofperception ranges from their notorious denial to the dissociation ofwhole personalities, a finding that is rare in the general population.31

4. Willpower can make you unresponsive to subtle rewards. Youdthink that judging choices in whole categories rather than by them-selves would have to improve your overall rate of reward. Wheneverit didnt, you ought to be able to call off the side bet that enforced therule. However, a number of modern writers have warned that yoursense of will may decrease rather than increase if you bind yourselftoo extensively to rules.

29 As Erdelyi has pointed out (1990), the unconscious but goal-directed effort to

forget which the psychoanalysts call repression does not differ in nature from the

conscious kind (suppression). I would suggest that its unconsciousness is shaped

by the incentive to avoid losing the stakes of personal rules.30 Aristotle: Bogen and Moravcsik, 1982; for a modern example, see Sjoberg

and Johnson, 1978.31 Dunn et al., 1993; Ross et al., 1992.


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Theologians have long known of the dangers of scrupulosity,the attempt to govern yourself minutely by rules. The philosopherof religion Paul Ricoeur has pointed out that freedom of will is

encroached upon not only by sin but by moral law, through thejuridization of action by which a scrupulous person encloseshimself in an inextricable labyrinth of commandments. Psycho-therapists have embraced this insight. Most of the schools of therapythat developed in Freuds wake made overgrown personal rulestheir chief target. Martin Hollis recent criticism of economic manraised the same concern:

A Rational Economic Man . . . must be able to reflect on whether the upshot of his

calculations is truly the rational course of action. This is to raise a query about the

base of the calculation . . . A person may find himself locked into his preferences

against his real interests.

These writers message is that personal rules can become prisons.32

How can this happen? Why should anyone who wasnt in thethrall of an immediate temptation ever conclude that she was trappedby her rules, and even hire a psychotherapist to free her? The sup-posed imprisoning process is made out of reward Its the stake ofan intertemporal prisoners dilemma. If a person regrets the exist-ence of such a stake even from the perspective of distance, butremains influenced by it, wed have to conclude that her personalrule doesnt serve her longest range interest.

It might seem from the logic of summing discount curves (Fig-ure 4) that cooperation in a repetitive prisoners dilemma would haveto serve the players long range interests, or else theyd never adoptthis strategy. But in everyday life a person can discern many possibleprisoners dilemmas in a given situation; and the way of groupingchoices that finally inspires her cooperation need not be the mostproductive, largely because of the selective effect of countability:

Personal rules operate most effectively on countable goals. Thusthe ease of comparing all financial transactions lets cash prices fluc-tuate much less over time than, say, the value of an angry outburst,or of a nights sleep. The motivational impact of a series of moods

must be less than that of an equally long series of cash purchases.

32 Ricoeur, 1971; many therapists and others reviewed in Ainslie, 1992 and in

press; Hollis, 1983, p. 260.


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108 GEORGE AINSLIE

The impact of having rewards marked by discrete stimuli can beseen in experiments where the cost of bad choices is lower payoffsvs. longer delays to payoffs.33 Amounts are eminently countable;

delays are a matter of intuition unless someone specifically meas-ures them. Accordingly, subjects achieve rational behavior towardamounts much more readily than to delays. By the same logic,when mid-range interests are based on well-marked rewards, andtheir richer, longer range alternatives are harder to specify, the moreconcrete options may win out by using personal rules.

Rules that will prove too concrete from a long-run perspectivemay still be attractive to someone trying hard to avoid her impulses,especially someone who has had a conspicuous addiction forinstance, the person who diets to the point of anorexia nervosa toend a history of overeating. Its easier to enforce specific rules about

diet than more subtle rules like eat what you need or eat whatyoull be glad of in retrospect, though if the latter were adequaterules theyd permit the most reward in the long run. When youseek the comparative safety of having the most clearcut criteria foryour personal rules, you may be forestalling not only short rangeimpulses but also your chances for the richest reward in the longrun.

So the most workable rules for intertemporal cooperation dontnecessarily bring the most reward in the long run. The mechanics ofpolicing this cooperation may produce the intrapsychic equivalentof regimentation, which will increase your efficiency at reward-getting in the categories youve defined, but reduce your sensitivityto less regular kinds of reward. Both hyperbolic discounting and thepersonal rules that compensate for it have distorting effects.

Personal rules confront us with the paradox of definition: that todefine a concept is to alter it, in this case toward something moremechanical. A person who concludes that she should maximizemoney becomes a miser; one who rules that she should minimize heropenness to emotional influence develops the numbing insensitivitythat clinicians have named alexithymia; if she concludes she shouldminimize risk, she becomes obsessively careful; and so forth. The

logic of rules may come to so overshadow your responsiveness toexperience that your behavior becomes formal and inefficient. A

33 For instance melioration experiments (Herrnstein and Prelec, 1992b).


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miser is too rigid to optimize her chances in a competitive market,and even a daring financier undermines the productiveness of hercapital if she rules that she must maximize each years profit. Sim-

ilarly, strict autonomy means shielding yourself against exploitationfrom others ability to invoke your passions; but alexithymics cantuse the richest strategy available for maximizing emotional reward,the cultivation of human relationships. And avoidance of danger atany cost is poor risk management.34

Modern culture has been slow to recognize the dilemma of self-control: that were endangered by our willpower as well as by ourimpulses. For instance, writers now wring their hands both about theaverage citizens rising body mass index and about the prevalenceof dieting in the young, without noting that this combination meansthat the enemy is now approaching from two opposing directions.

This and the previous three side effects may sometimes keep theexercise of willpower from seeming better than an addiction, evenfrom the perspective of distance, which gives the truest reading ofobjective value.

Personal rules may sometimes not be worth the trouble. In these fourways personal rules sharpen the basic conflict of successive motiv-ational states and raise its stakes. Rules we create in our long rangeinterest may or may not wind up advancing this interest againstshorter range ones. After the need for clarity has taken its toll onsubtlety, and overcaution has reduced flexibility, and undercautionwith its consequent lapses has eroded resolve and corrupted self-observation in short after the makeshift nature of our attempt atdeciding according to principle has caught up with us the conflictbetween global and local approaches to choice-making is no longersimply one of long vs. short range interests. Sometimes a particularglobal approach is less productive, even in the long run, than local,myopic alternatives.

In the interpersonal realm the dangers of rules are much betterknown. The English long ago established courts of equity to correctdistortions that arose from laws, and that great social rule-maker,

Jeremy Bentham, cautioned that rules shouldnt be fully binding.

34 Alexithymia: Nemiah, 1977; the cost of rules for maximizing annual income:

Malekzadeh and Nahavandi, 1987.


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110 GEORGE AINSLIE

A recent review by legal scholar Cass Sunstein makes it clear thatsocial control by rules creates side-effects analogous to my prob-lems 1, 3, and 4: The need for preserving precedents makes them too

rigid, this rigidity drives discretion underground into transactionsthat arent a matter of record, and the need to use available brightlines between what is and isnt permissible both forbids innocuousactivities and licenses cleverly defined harmful ones.35 Problem 2is also evident: Some potential drug addicts may be protected bylegal deterrence, but many who are not deterred become identifiedcriminals who are worse off than they would be if drugs werentillegal.

The robustness of suboptimal rules may sometimes make addic-tions more attractive. Better to be fat, someone might think, thananorectic. Your will may become so confining that a pattern of reg-

ular lapses actually makes you better off in the long run. The loreof addictionology often attributes bingeing to a patients inhibited-ness in the rest of her life; her general overcontrol is said to set upperiodic episodes of breaking loose. The model of intertemporal bar-gaining predicted by hyperbolic discount curves provides a specificrationale for this pattern.

Alcoholics are sometimes described who become nicer, or moregenuinely creative, or more fully human when drunk. Furthermore,some addicts plan binges in advance. Such people may believe thattheir binges are undesirable indeed, rationality will almost cer-tainly dictate such a belief but the therapists they hire find themmysteriously unresponsive to treatment. The patient who arrangesfor drinking several days in advance goes off her Antabuse, forinstance, or brings bottles to her rehabilitation program for lateruse cant simply be yielding to a short range impulse. This isbehavioral evidence that she experiences her rational plans as overlynarrow rules which, even at a distance, appear to need hedging.This phenomenon suggests why a simplistic policy of the morewillpower, the better contradicts the experience of many addicts.Theyre able to listen to reason only when reason, represented bypersonal rules, stops starving their own long range interests.

35 1995, pp. 991996; he discusses Bentham on pp. 10061007.


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IMPLICATIONS FOR LEGAL INTERVENTION

If the self is a population of interests conducting limited warfare

with each other to a greater or lesser extent, and the will is a bargain-ing stance in a somewhat volatile intertemporal prisoners dilemma,how should the law intervene?

First there is the question of whether sobriety is always a personsbetter option. There may be some emotionally inept people who facea choice between being a drunkard, say, and adopting what wouldbe the equivalent of the compulsive overcontrol in anorexia nervosa.Obviously a third option, emotional growth, is better than either, asit is in the conflict between anorexia and obesity; but it may notseem possible, and in any case represents a separate question. Itcould be argued that the United States as a whole made a similar

choice when it rejected Prohibition, and for reasons that look likethe negative side-effects of will writ large: the legalism in whathad been an area of spontaneous choice, the transformation of theundeterred into criminals, the creation of an underworld from theresulting secrecy, and simply missing the freedom to drink in mod-eration without conflict. This is not to argue that most people, or anypeople, are better off addicted, but to point out that the question isnot always crazy.

Next, given that its in a persons longest range interest to besober, how can legal policy support this interest against her shortrange interests in addiction? Its no surprise that the intertemporalbargaining approach finds both conventional interpretations want-ing. To regard the addict as helpless is to abandon the greatesttool of her long range interest, her will.36 To regard her as rationalis to deny the disportionate power even ordinary rewards have ifimmediate, much less those created by a predisposed brain. The bestconclusion is that addiction is just an outsized case of a vulnerabil-ity that everyone has, and that it may have become outsized eitherfrom genetic endowment or a history of bad choices, or both. Theproblem for legal policy-making is that there seems to be no natural

36 AAs seeming abandonment of the will may actually be a way of tacitly

appealing to it, much as the Calvinists doctrine of predestination is said to haveincreased the effective willpower of its adherents by discouraging the hedging

that usually erodes the wills power. I have developed this argument elsewhere

(1992 and in press).


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line between addiction and ordinary weakness of the flesh. It maybe useful to recognize a special status for intractable addictions, butthe threshold for such a status has to be arbitrary, much like that for

bankruptcy.The seeming intractability of addiction comes from the persons

recursive reaction to failures of her will, creating a lapse districtfor the addiction. Even so, preferences in someones short rangeinterest are temporary by definition, so that the addict is not a whole-hearted opponent, but a conflicted one. How do we shore up onefaction in someone elses ambivalence? Policeman and therapistalike become like envoys to a sovereign country. Addiction mayhave torn the country with dissension, but it is still ready to unite indeed, probably eager to unite against outside coercion.

Coercion undermines a persons will to do what we demand. It

replaces the incentive for the person to maintain her credibility toherself with external incentives, thus reducing the motivational basisof her will and at the same time offering a game much like cops-and-robbers: If someone else has taken responsibility for watching herbehavior, she may be comfortable trying to get away with as muchas she can. That is, if an external agent is acting for the cop half ofher ambivalence, she can act wholeheartedly for the robber half.As in the international situation, the efficient solution is diplomacy,which involves winning the trust by both sides that adequate rewardsin both short and long ranges are possible. This is psychotherapy.Diplomacy failing, war may be necessary, but it should be decidedupon with the knowledge that it may fatally harm a given addictslong range interest. The consideration that limits our exercise of thatoption is the same one that started us intervening in addictions tobegin with, that is, empathy the way that any addict can hold ourown feelings hostage.

At the practical level, these are not new insights. The theoreticalvalue of deducing the implications of hyperbolic discounting fordeliberate self-defeating behaviors is to make them not paradoxical,not an exception to general laws of motivation. This in turn mayoffer ways out of the tired stalemate between disease and utility

models of addiction.


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George Ainslie - A Research-based Theory of Addictive Motivation

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